Posted
by
kdawsonon Saturday August 02, 2008 @12:54PM
from the new-states-of-matter-oh-boy dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Researchers have found that the long-held belief that only the outer, valence, electrons of an atom interact may be false. Computer simulations have shown that at pressures like those in the center of the Earth the inner, core, electrons of lithium also interact."

If it was dogma the priests of chemistry would be denying the evidence and punishing its discoverers.

Evidence you are not a scientist. The word "dogma" just has a different meaning from what you are used to when talking about science. To wit: "The Central Dogma" [wikipedia.org]. You should call up Francis Crick and tell him he was using that word wrong. Maybe they will posthumously take back his Nobel Prize.

You should call up Francis Crick and tell him he was using that word wrong. Maybe they will posthumously take back his Nobel Prize.

No need. Crick has already acknowledged that he really didn't understand the meaning of the word "dogma" when he used it. However, his ideas were so grond breaking that the word itself has changed/added meaning to accommodate him.

I am a scientist. Francis Crick was using the wrong word (he would not disagree with that statement). "Dogma" does not belong in science. When eminent scientists name something in a stupid way, we tend to revise the wording a generation or two later. That's why we have top and bottom quarks instead of truth and beauty. They didn't have to take any Nobel prizes away to do that. We use "momentum" instead of "quantity of motion," but no one suggests Newton was a bad scientist because of it. In chemistry

Biology, certainly not chemistry of physics. Dogma is mostly used today by those who wish push science back into the realm of superstition so they can mutilate and burn. Those enlightened by the scientific method use different terminology [wikipedia.org].

This is slashdot. It leans far left and toward science and aways away from Microsoft, MPAA/RIAA, and SCO.

For supposedly trying to be neutral, a lot more posts negative of religion or the right get modded up. The GP could be -1 troll as easily as +5 insightful. Unfortunately the modding doesn't work and you have to post AC if your not following the official prejudices.

For supposedly trying to be neutral, a lot more posts negative of religion or the right get modded up.

Who promised you "neutrality"? Good posts that are negative of religion or the right are just easier to write. You see more of them modded up because more of them are posted.

Instead of whining that everyone is biased, why don't you just mod up posts you agree with if you don't like it, or start writing posts "positive of religion or the right" that are actually insightful or interesting?

Do not promote personal agendas. Do not let your opinions factor in. Try to be impartial about this. Simply disagreeing with a comment is not a valid reason to mark it down. Likewise, agreeing with a comment is not a valid reason to mark it up. The goal here is to share ideas. To sift through the haystack and find needles. And to keep the children who like to spam Slashdot in check.

I think if this was taken more seriously, people wouldn't have to post as AC when posti

The caveat to organized religion and extremist religion is that its really politics and not religion.

When crazies say God / Science / cowboy neal made me do it, chances are they're just crazy (except maybe the cowboy neal part). We should treat them as crazies and not their respective religion, science, or nealism.

Religion, much like science has done a lot for humanity. Don't forget the early humanism movement which came from the church methodically explored science as a means of understanding their r

I would also argue that it wasn't ever really a dogma of chemistry. It was more of a useful approximation.

Chemists have long known that all the electrons contribute in some way to interactions. However it is a very useful approximation to say that only the outer electrons contribute significantly to bonding interactions. The fact is that they greatly dominate all such interactions, making the approximation useful both conceptually and computationally.

'Dogma' is common in the sciences, but it implies something different than the formal definition you are thinking of. It is usually used to describe a highly simplified model of how a system works. It's just a useful way to think about something.

The most well known example is the central dogma of molecular biology [wikipedia.org]. By the time you finish freshman molecular biology in college, you know that it is a gross simplification of how a cell works, but that it is a very good first approximation.

Indeed, there are several dogmas of science, and they are each found to be violated after a few years.

On the central dogma of molecular biology for example, the dogma holds that DNA is transcribed into RNA, which is then translated into protein.

With retrovirus though, it goes RNA--> DNA --> RNA --> protein, which is the most blatant violation. Regulatory RNA mollecules also violate the dogma, showing that whole protein step is non-essential.

Given the traditional definition of dogma as something that is inflexible to the point of causing violence, I think it's good that science has started to co-opt it and prove concretely that dogmas can be violated without the general veracity of them falling apart.

Maybe religions will take note. "Hey, the central dogma of mobio has some exceptions but still DNA gets turned into RNA and then gets turned into protein. Maybe if we admit the bread doesn't ACTUALLY become flesh, we won't all go to hell?"

I really don't understand the modern penchant for changing the meaning of a word to affect change in society. Perhaps, rather than changing the meaning of dogma and having to invent another word to mean inflexible belief, we should encourage people to honesty give up tightly held dogmas.

I don't think it's necessarily an altogether inaccurate characterization of the way some scientists can behave towards colleagues. Highly surprising new discoveries are often treated with enormous skepticism by scientists until they are independently confirmed (theory) or reproduced (experiments). The researchers behind highly surprising new results will meet all sorts of reactions that can vary from keen interest, respect, healthy skepticism, disbelief, rejection, ridicule, pillorying, to withholding of fu

No, it's the difference between science and human nature. Like or or not, we evolved [or were designed, whatever] to be dogmatic. It's a very important survival mechanism. Human beings hate change, hate it with a passion. One of the big ideas in science is the idea that knowledge can change. But even in science, the general attitude is that there is a static unchanging set of truths that the scientific method is slowly approaching.

Injecting some snide comment about religion into every science story on/. is getting about as bad as injecting "Bush" into...well, every other story on here. Dude, if you wanna beat-off guilt free just do it!

Not to mention that any 2nd year Chemistry student will tell you that it was never dogma. The reason why they don't consider the "interior" electrons is because analytical solutions are... difficult and there influence is negligible. So, they ignore the effects because it doesn't effect the outcome.

(Aside: Engineers do the same thing. If you saw the math that they use, they regularly assume that series converge and chop off all but a few terms because it won't change the outcome in context.)

It's kinda the whole point. Do what you can with what you have where you are, and when you find out how you're wrong you adapt.

Unless you're dealing with cosmology. Then, whenever your theory proves to be wrong or you observe phenomenon that it did not and could not have accounted for, you just patch up your existing theory without questioning any of the underlying assumptions and without examining alternative explanations. Or worse, you just ignore contradictory evidence.

In any field where we cannot be reasonably certain of the tests we're doing let alone the results, it's going to involve a lot of conjecture. The scientists who refuse to say "We just don't know" are on the path to dogmatic thought not scientific thought. I would expect any field on the fringe of our knowledge to involve a lot of uncertainty and a lot of people being shown wrong....constantly. If they weren't being shown to be wrong constantly, that'd be about as likely as coding a huge project on the fly once with no debugging and have it work the first compile.

I don't see how that aspect of human nature has any bearing on the scientific method though.

1. Find some part of cosmology that is not yet fully explained (there are a lot of these, so this part is easy!)2. Claim the explanation is ELECTRICITY!3. Never provide any proof ever, only claim that the prevailing, incomplete theory is wrong.

If science weren't dogmatic, there would be organizations and grants who would say "yeah we don't really think this Electric Universe idea is true, but let's devise ways to put it to the test anyway".

That is because there is nothing to test. It's up to the electric universe people to come up with actual, verifiable experiments. But they don't do that, they just make vague claims and complain about conspiracies against them.

Science is no more true than religion. They are both flawed perspectives that have proven useful, which is why continue to exist. But none of it is the real truth. They're like tools in a toolbox, and you grab for them when you've got a problem to solve, and sometimes they don't work, so you try to improve them so they will work, then use em for a purpose and stick em back in the toolbox for later. That's it, that's all.

Good points. You don't really have "dogmas" in science, just hypotheses and results that you better not question because then you might piss off someone, lose you grants and be blackballed in peer reviews.

Sadly, the peer review system does not shield scientists from flaring egos and grant sucking. It's a great system where it works, and surely beats the old ways of taunting competitors with results they couldn't reproduce as was the case during the Renaissance. But it still breaks sometimes when seniority, ego and money are involved.

And of course, politics now play a role. Take something that should be as neutral as cosmology, namely, climate study. Now it's tainted with politics. That's rather disquieting.

The motto of the Royal Society -- the 500-year old British academy of sciences -- is "Nullius in Verba", meaning you are not compelled by the word of someone else, only by truth. I wish it were the case.

So let me get this straight... In a large enough sample group, all hypotheses are wrong? I don't buy that.

The trouble I keep seeing with most new, Large Format Science (as opposed to opperant, small-format math) is interpritation. Application of one, possible correct thesis to another, possibly wrong thesis. Does this disprove both? No. But how do we know which is correct? Further testing.

Granted, the Zen approach of admitting you know nothing as a path to enlightenment doesn't really work for most scientis

Oh dear... as someone said already, I expect this is probably an electric universe rant, and that responding to it will do almost nothing. I could moderate it down, but other mods probably wouldn't understand my reasons for doing so, as the parent avoided mentioning the crackpot theory itself.

It should be said, however, that the odd thing about the dark matter predictions are that they work very well, as do the dark energy predictions. We did many have other models that were put forward, some containing significant changes to various theories. None of them worked nearly as well as our current model with dark matter. There are many people in the community that don't like our lack of knowledge about dark matter, but it works so well that, as with many things in high energy physics, we can only assume that it is actually there until we come up with a better theory.

As for black holes, I would suggest that you actually learn modern GR before suggesting that you understand the theory better than everyone else in the community does. In fact, try learning real cosmology, and looking at results like measurements of CMB anisotropy, and Big Bang nucleosynthesis.

It's not so much anti-science as it is pro-electric-universe, which is a theory favoured by a bunch of kooks.

Yep. A bunch of kooks called "electrical engineers".

Even if some electric universe proponents are electrical engineers, they are called kooks for a reason. But most are just kooks. Anyway, I would rather learn about electrical engineering from electrical engineers, and cosmology from cosmologists.

Electric universe-proponents are not interested in science. What they are interested in is to prove th

That's the way a rational mind would approach existence. How that relates to "life will find a way" i definitely do not see however. Fictitious chaoticians aren't science.

Keep in mind the number of examples where in following that process, nothing finds a way. The whole point of science is to find out where we're wrong. Science can never say we are 100% right about anything as the whole process is SUPPOSED TO BE about trying to make our assumptions fail.

No, they really didn't. Hell, over 2000 years ago the Greeks already knew the Earth was a sphere. They even knew its diameter! The idea that everyone ever thought the world was flat is entirely false - go ready a history book and stop perpetuating such garbage.

The knowledge that the earth was round lasted through the dark ages too. When Columbus was laughed at by the church' experts, they didn't point out that the world was flat, but that Columbus used a too small value for the circumference of the earth. Therefore he would starve to death before reaching Asia. They were right, Columbus was just very lucky to hit America before it happened.

Generally, the dark ages weren't nearly as dark as historians from the 19th century depicted it to be.

They weren't dark because they completely lost the Greek knowledge rather they simply never built on any previous discoveries and doing so pissed off the church. In fact, the church was pretty good at locking that stuff away.

Not only they knew, they had even measured the circumference of the Earth! It just drives me crazy that all this knowledge was somehow forgotten for over 1000 years... For example, even Colombus who knew the earth was round, should have also known the distance to India going the other way around, so it should be obvious to him that he found a new continent...

The knowledge wasn't forgotten. Columbus was the exception, not the rule. Everyone was telling him "Columbus, you're a dumbass. India's at least twice as far away as you think it is". You can't blame an entire time period for Columbus' fortuitous stupidity.

If Columbus was the only stupid one, and everyone else was telling him he was wrong, home come to this day, Native Americans are still referred to as "Indians". If it wasn't what people commonly called them, the name would have never caught on.

Easy: he thought they were Indians, he said they were Indians, and nobody else had a direct look at them until much later. As the modern disputants of anthropocentric climate change have shown, all it takes it a little doubt or misinformation (intentional or not) to muddy the waters for a long time. And while the scientists are scratching their heads and giving him the benefit of the doubt, ordinary people become convinced of the easier-to-grasp "fact": rather than there being a giant landmass nobody had

Indeed. Columbus took the smallest available estimate of the size of the earth, and the largest available estimate of the size of Asia, and decided he could just barely sail there. It's the same kind of cherrypicking of favorable data that got us into Iraq.

It wasn't forgotten. The reason Columbus had so much trouble getting funding was that the royal courts of the time hadn't forgotten; they used Eratosthenes' old number (confirmed by the astrolabe), and then accepted Ptolemy's assessment that it was 180 degrees from one end of Europe to the opposite end of Asia. They knew there was no way that Columbus could reach Japan from the Canaries, 12,000 miles away, without running out of water (no ship of the era was big enough to carry enough for a trip of that length). So advised against giving him money, no matter how much Columbus insisted it was only 2,300. As it was, the reason why the terms of his contract with Fredinand & Isabella was so generous is that everyone expected him to die on the trip rather than make landfall.

And Columbus wasn't ignorant of Eratosthenes' number and Ptolemy's estimate; it was simply that he reached his error based on a different set of authorities:

1) That of Marinus of Tyre (from the first century AD), who thought that Eurasia was 235 degrees in width instead of about 180.2) The measurement of Alfraganus that underestimated the size of a degree somewhat.3) His own mistake of assuming that Alfraganus's mile was the same length as an Italian mile (which were 2/3rd the size).

Based on those numbers, it was perfectly reasonable to believe he'd reached Asia.

Well, if some guy says he measured the planet with a twiddly angle thing and looking at a shadow in a well, and he knows the width of the Atlantic, another guy says he thinks its a different size and he sails across it, and got to India and comes back with a load of loot and some dark skinned people to prove it. If you were the average 15th century Spaniard, your not a scientist, nor a mathematician, who are you going to believe? The guy who claims he worked it all out with angles, or the guy who said he'

Scientific theories only hold out until something else comes along with more facts that change our understanding.

Uh, yeah? That's the whole point of Science. Scientists try to create theories that best fit the available data. More importantly, they are always looking for new evidence which will either corroborate or contradict their theories.

GP said they are always looking for evidence to back up or refute theories. That's exactly what they are doing with evolution. Except (and here's the kicker) the fossil record backs up evolution. No evidence has been found that contradicts evolution.

I can't understand why people act like science is a religion. Science is about finding the truth through experiment and observation. If creationism was correct then guess what: SCIENCE WOULD AGREE.

Really? For science I rather find the more we understand, the more we realize we don't understand.

This is true. But this also increases our understanding, not decreases it. known unknowns > unknown unknowns.Scientific theories only hold out until something else comes along with more facts that change our understanding.

To a degree, yes. But a new theory doesn't usually completely obviate the old one. Newtons F=MA still works for the vast majority of the time for things us humans are likely to come into contact with, it just begins to break down as you approach the speed of light. Special relativity only becomes relevant in special cases.

Really? For science I rather find the more we understand, the more we realize we don't understand. Science is full of unexplained holes that theories postulate answers for. 500+ years ago scientists thought the earth was flat. Scientific theories only hold out until something else comes along with more facts that change our understanding. My 2 cents.

There was a brief period after the loss of Greek natural philosophy from ~500 to ~1000 CE that some (but not all) Western natural philosophers thought the Earth was flat. Other than that, the only time that some prominent Western natural philosophers thought the Earth was flat was prior to Socrates. On the other hand, Chinese philosophers believed the Earth was flat until the 17th century.

It is important to note that Platonic and Aristotelian natural philosophy had a significant effect on people believing

Science is full of unexplained holes that theories postulate answers for.

I find it strange that religionists would embrace this line of reasoning, for it shoves god into the gaps of science's understanding. As science fills in the gaps, less and less is left for god to do, until one day we are studying Christianity the same way we study Greek mythology. Don't get me wrong, I can't wait for that day, I just find it odd that the more intelligent amongst the religious can't see where this line of reasoning leads.

Scientific theories only hold out until something else comes along with more facts that change our understanding.

Scientific theories only hold out until something else comes along with more facts that change our understanding.

Yeah, well, duh. Science is mainly there to explain and predict observations, as long as our predictions and observations match, science is quite happy. It doesn't mean that science is giving you truth, it simply means that it gets it "close enough". If we can make new observations that can't be explained, then the theories get extended and fixed up, but they don't go just 'poof' and are proven all wrong, they are simply replaced by theories that work better at those new edge cases. For the non-edge cases t

Scientists didn't think the world was flat 500+ years ago, the general public did. Scientists were measuring the circumference over 2,200 years ago to an error of http://www.greekembassy.org/embassy/Content/en/Article.aspx?office=3&folder=218&article=23823

The catholics use the bible as some sort of starting point for their dogma but the exact rules are set by the leadership, not the book (and are often mutable). The protestants are the ones who follow only the book (of course different groups follow it in different ways...). That's where the big division came from.

Just because an electron is in the outer "core" doesn't mean it's a valence electron. Similarly, the converse is also true. As IUPAC put it, the number of valence electrons is equal to "the maximum number of univalent atoms (originally hydrogen or chlorine atoms) that may combine with an atom of the element under consideration, or with a fragment, or for which an atom of this element can be substituted." This still holds true for the interactions in question in TFA.

Doesn't seem surprising to me in the least. Given enough pressure and heat, not only do the inner electrons start to interact, but so do the nuclei. This is called fusion. I'm not a particle physicist, but it seems to be mostly related. As you increase the amount of heat and pressure, and therefore increase the energy acting on the particles, the particles that under normal lab conditions usually wouldn't interact, because of insufficient energy to be moved, are now completely able to participate in a r

This is fascinating. I know it is all very theoretical, and based on computer models of how a material behaves under extreme pressure.

But frankly, I fail to see any practical applications for this. We are talking about 1,5 million atmospheres and 3000 Kelvin - hence not a typical lab environment.

The point isn't that they act differently under high pressure; it's that they act differently. Whenever we've got a model that's proved wrong - and it happens all the time - then new theories come forward to explain

Standard for "Science Journalism." The result is actually far less earth-shattering than the author is trying to portray. Researchers think they have found a set of conditions in which the usual models used in chemistry don't apply anymore.

Now that's a fucking shocker. Most Chemistry today focuses on conditions either similar to STP or than can be created within STP. STP is "Standard Temperature and Pressure" Usually defined for the purpose of convenience of communication as 298K and 760 Torr. They define this as "standard" because everybody in Chemistry knows that chemistry changes as you change conditions, and it's useful to have a standard to compare to, even an arbitrary one (298K, 760 Torr is "average" sea level temperature and air pressure). The standard is also very useful for Chemical Engineering.

High-pressure reactions are an almost completely unexplored aspect of chemistry; and the research that has been done shows that atoms and molecules behave much differently under high pressures. For example, a lot of research is being done now utilizing ultra-high pressure water as a replacement for organic solvents, for greener chemistry. If there's one thing we've learned from these high-pressure experiments, it's that everything acts different, so it really doesn't go against our "dogma" at all; it just goes against the "dogma" of STP reactions, which makes sense, as this was not an STP reaction. It's an incredibly cool finding; just not something that's going to turn all of our current chemical understanding upside down by violating "dogma."

For example, a lot of research is being done now utilizing ultra-high pressure water as a replacement for organic solvents, for greener chemistry.

I think you mean ultra-high pressure carbon dioxide, not water. Supercritical CO2 [wikipedia.org] is indeed an interesting area of research, as it can be used to replace dangerous organic solvents, making industrial chemistry safer and greener.

And I agree that there is likely a rich unexplored landscape of interesting chemistry beyond standard temperatures and pressures.

It's a reasonable statement. Anyone in the business (chemical engineering) would be likely to make it. Supercritical CO2 is much more advanced tech than supercritical H2O. Arguably it's more useful, too, since you probably get better interaction with nonpolar substances, the critical pressure for CO2 is a lot lower than for H2O, and the critical temperature is near room temperature (as opposed to nearly 300 C for water). Supercritical H2O undoubtably has applications, but so far as I know supercritical

Chemists already know that core electrons do influence bonding and such. It is simply a short cut to ignore them. Hence, when one wants to get the last few digits on your answer you turn on "core correlation" which treats the core and valance regions the same.

Furthermore, the conditions in question here are so extreme as to border on being a plasma or some such. So I am not really surprised to see some effect that are negligible under "normal" conditions to grow and become important.

was any 'dogma' really overturned? My understanding was always that the basic chemical rules were first order approximations, not a comprehensive description of how everything must behave. For example, xenon is an 'inert' element, with the outer shell full, but xenon tetra-fluoride (XeF4) is a stable compound. I learned that in high-school in the 1980's.

Chemistry's rules exist because they functionally explain chemistry in an accessible manner. Physicists have known that there are more accurate models for a while. Unfortunately, these models are too complex to be useful to someone trying to synthesize a chemical. If this has any significant applications, we will still be seeing classical chemistry for at least a century to come (barring the singularity.)

I mean, it's been almost a century since relativity and quantum mechanics came on the scene, but for the majority of engineering tasks, they remain useless. Between processors hitting the atomic scale and more probes hitting the atmosphere, that may change. However, I don't see chemistry getting to the point where we even begin to see practical chemistry that doesn't rely on classical models. The new ones are simply to complex to use.

Honestly this result is not unexpected. The interactions of electrons and nuclei depend on several factors: distance, energy, and charge. There is also the factor of election-electron interaction, which is where the idea of valence electrons comes about.

Normally the outermost electrons of an atom are far enough from the nucleus that the distance from the nucleus and the repulsion from the other electrons on the atom allows them to more easily interact with other atoms. This is how bonding works, an electron gets "shared" between two atoms or the electron completely jumps off the atom and turns the atom into an ion which is attracted to other, oppositely charged, ions. Yes, I'm oversimplifying quite a bit for the layman.

Every electron in an atom can interact with another atom, it's just MUCH less likely to happen for the inner electrons of an atom and the interactions of the inner electrons to other atoms are much weaker than those of the outer electrons. Increasing the pressure allows the inner electrons to interact more strongly with other atoms.

Under higher pressures and energies two things happen. First of all atoms are pressed closer to each other. This means that all of the electrons are closer to other atoms. This increases the likelihood that an electron will interact with another atom, forming a bond. The second effect is that the increased energy tends to cause the electrons in atoms to jump to higher energy states which are further out from that atom's nucleus. This means less crowding which means less repulsion from other electrons which means that each atom's nucleus is more exposed to interaction with other atom's electrons. Again, I'm oversimplifying for the layman.

The extreme of this is when the pressure is great enough that each nucleus gets close enough for the nuclear force to overcome the electrostatic repelling force between the two positively charged nuclei. When this happens you get neutronium, the core of a neutron star. Obviously you don't normally see these levels of pressure on Earth!

What is really in question is the exact numbers of the interactions. At what pressure does a certain phase of atom to atom interaction appear? How does the increased pressure affect rates of reactions between atoms? Scientists are trying to measure hard numbers of the effects of pressure on chemistry. There already is a good deal of theoretical work but the experimental work is a bit tough to do given the conditions needed.

"Researchers have found that the long-held belief that only the outer, valence, electrons of an atom interact may be false.

Take Chemistry 101 and 102 in a college today. They no longer believe this. Though I guess it is unusual for lithium. However the center of the Earth is as hot as surface of the sun, and is essentially a ball of plasma, which is so hot nucleons congregate together and all the electrons dance around it.

That's nice. Science is fun. But since when would we ever find Lithium at the Earth's core? When would Lithium ever come under such pressure? The only Lithium that matters to me is the stuff IN MY VEINS...

You mean like the computer simulations that say the earth is warming? Hahahaha...

Indeed. Between your intuition and computer simulations running on super-computers based on decades of research on predictive models designed by the most competent and dedicated researchers in the domain, always trust your intuition.

This is why I never watch the weather channel, I just look at how leaves move in the wind, how menacing clouds look, then I wet my pointer finger, put it in the air and I can tell you how the weather will be tomorrow. Well I can tell what it will be, doesn't mean I turn out to be right, but hey, the Weather Channel is wrong sometimes too!

Hmm... maybe it's better to say that Philosophy tries to explain some of the who and why of things. Some of it happens to be wrapped in a religious context, but much of it tries to step outside of a strict religious context.

Religion is mostly a social construct, more often than not concerned with maintaining and justifying a given status quo amongst its leaders and followers.

"Anything outside the world around us (aka: God) is, by definition, not bound by the rules of science. "Well, if all the world is crea

For instance, you can scientifically prove that God doesn't exist all you want given the small amount of information we know about our universe.

well, we know where you get your bias against science.

Science tries to prove testable positives. You know a theory is "wrong" if the observations don't match the hypothesis. Even then, it doesn't necessarily mean the theory must be completely disregarded (example: newtonian and quantum mechanics coexist today).

You can't "disprove" god with science because god is not rationally testable. You can't "prove" it either because of that, though, and as such no man of science will accept "the will of god" as an explanation for something, or a reason to perform/avoid certain actions.

No, you cannot. Its impossible to show scientifically that anything doesn't exit. You can just show that something actually does exist. Thats why we were able to prove that, under condition XYZ, only valance electrons react. As long as we didn't test it in every possible scenario (and even then, we cannot prove that there aren't any other possibility), we cannot say that there aren't some ways where that theory doesn't hold. And as this showed, there was a scenario we hadn't tested.

Scientists (real ones) will never say that its impossible for God to exist. They'll just say that all of the currently provided evidence are bogus, and that there isn't any valid theory that shows its existance beyond wishful thinking by a few zealots. Doesn't change that God may exist. We just have nothing to lead us to think it does.

If some scientist claims to be able to prove that it doesn't exist (or that ANYTHING ELSE doesn't exist), they're doing faux-science.